Category: off topic

Can I make a motion that the words “the leading provider of” be banned from all press releases?

For some reason (maybe because all entrepreneurs dream of world domination), I found this particularly funny. Where else would you see the Technorati tags “comics”, “chickens” and “economics” all on the same post?

I posted back in April about how I had started to use LinkedIn, and since then I’ve been actively working at building and using my LinkedIn professional network. I regularly review my connections to see if there is anyone who I should be following up with, and I sometimes browse my connections’ connections to see if there is anyone that I should be networking with. I started following that trail tonight, and a couple of hours later, here I am at 1:30am still poking around.

Christian Mayaud, a second-degree connection who has almost 8,000 connections of his own, lists his Sacred Cow Dung blog in his LinkedIn profile, on which I found his “Cheaters’ Guide to LinkedIn” (most of which I don’t see as “cheating” but as best practices for making the most of the network). That pointed me to two Yahoo! groups, MyLinkedinPowerForum and LinkedInnovators, which in turn contain a ton of other information about using LinkedIn for professional networking (plus a lot of the usual crap). Just when I was almost caught up on my reading…

Update: I saw this link this morning that describes to newbies how to get started with LinkedIn without being overwhelmed. I think that I’ll send it to all those people who accepted my invitation but still only have one contact (me) a month later.

It’s a bit hard to think about the real world when I’m wandering around a market in small-town Provence, but I did see something yesterday that gave me pause. While hiking around the Pont du Gard (a really spectacular piece of Roman acqueduct to the west of Avignon), I was struck by the notion that this is engineering — what could we build today that would still be around in 2000 years? Certainly not our software…

Also had a nice mention of Column 2 on the ebizQ Blog Watch — check it out for other BPM and related blogs.

Headed off for a few weeks vacation, so expect very little blogging until mid-June.

Just catching up on the week’s email that I had no time to answer, and noticed that the Earth Observatory‘s pictures of the week included one of London. If you know where to look, you can see Portman Square where the conference was held this week — a little square of greenery just to the northeast of Hyde Park.

You can subscribe to a weekly email that contains links to some very cool satellite images from the home page of the Earth Observatory site. I used to write software for analyzing satellite images so find this a particularly good distraction, but some of my non-remote-sensing friends also enjoy it.

Thomas over at the Workflows – Collaboration Technology blog gave me a new title this week: BPM guru.

Although I recently changed my title to read “Strategic IT Planner/Architect” after being dissed for using the C-word, I think I like “BPM guru” better.

A few weeks ago, I was involved in making a proposal to a bank for a consulting gig related to business intelligence. Although we had an inside track on what they wanted, and we proposed a team that could deliver the goods, they decided to go with one of the big management consulting firms, in part because they felt that the larger firm presented a lower risk.

I fought against this prejudice for years when I ran a small (40-person) systems integration company, and were shut out of some opportunities because of our size. Customers who did hire us realized that small is good: we tended to attract a better quality of team member, keep them well-trained, and motivate them appropriately through the right combination of profit-sharing and foozball tables. From the customer standpoint, they held a great deal more leverage over us than they would over a larger SI because they were a larger percentage of our business, and we were very motivated to make them happy, repeat customers who could be used as references. Our reputation was our main marketing asset, and the only way to make that work was to out-perform the big guys.

These days, given the abysmal track record of a couple of the big firms, I find it hard to believe that the myth of “big company = low risk” is still alive and well. The last time that I was involved in a project with one of the big SIs, it was more than a year late (at last check) and I’m assuming that it’s also way over budget. Also consider some of the recent layoffs announced at big companies, including a whopping 13,000 at IBM. Do you think that they considered the impact on your project before they laid off a staff member who works with you, or supports the project in some way?

Risky business, hiring these big companies.

I just had a chance to read the details of last month’s London Business Forum event featuring Tom Peters and Richard Scase in a boxing ring:

The room was cavernous, its high ceiling vaulted with oak beams. In the centre was a boxing ring, shining under floodlights, and on all sides were hundreds of seats, arranged as if for a prize fight, their legs wreathed in tendrils of dry ice. The delegates filed in via a mezzanine, some open-mouthed with confusion, wondering for a split-second if they had the right place, as a familiar tune thundered over the giant sound system: “Eye of the Tiger.”

Thus began the London Business Forum 2005.

…Newcomers to the London Business Forum were told they should expect the unusual and the speakers duly arrived in a burst of disco lights and dance music, wearing brightly coloured silk capes.

Too funny! I definitely want to attend more conferences like that. In fact, I want to do more business like that in general: more fun, more creative, more engaging. I’m often in the position of trying to get passive members of a team to become active participants, and having some unusual “fun” components is a great way to engage people, although I can’t see myself in a boxing ring wearing a silk cape any time soon.

Don’t miss the great quote from Prof. Scase on leadership: “We currently have too many 21st-century managers and not enough 21st-century leaders. We have a flood of 300,000 MBAs and I think they should be treated like garden manure: spread thinly.”

Tons of stuff showing up these days about Skype, a free VOIP service, such as a ZDnet article, “Skype goes for the gold”, discussing how the newly-developing paid add-ons will eventually allow Skype to become profitable while remaining a free service for computer-to-computer calls. The longest-standing paid service is SkypeOut, which allows you to call any landline at greatly reduced rates, presumably because it makes the connection from your computer to the target country via IP, then bridges to a landline for a local call. New services coming out are Skype Voicemail and SkypeIn, the latter being a phone number for your Skype identity that allows a landline user to call you. For example, if you live in South Africa but do a lot of calling with the UK, you can get a UK phone number that, when called, will ring through to your Skype session on your computer, no matter where you’re located at the time.

I’ve been using Skype for a number of months now, for both voice and text (IM). Although I primarily use it to talk to other computer-based users in Australia and North America, I also use SkypeOut for making overseas calls, and for making calls when I’m travelling in order to avoid mobile roaming charges. If my hotel doesn’t have broadband (a rarity these days), I can just find a wireless hotspot, connect my laptop, plug in my headset and make calls on Skype while I download my email. Okay, I look a bit geeky doing that, but it’s worth it.

My only problem is that at my current rate, I won’t use up my €10 SkypeOut credit before I’m 90: I made a four-minute call to the UK earlier this week that cost me less than €0.07.